5 Things That Keep Us From Fully Enjoying Our Young Children by Erin Leyba

Thursday, October 16, 2014

Today, I welcome Erin Leyba, LCSW, PhD of parenthappy.org to share her post with us.****Children
are naturally full of innocence, joy, exuberance, and wonder. Just
spending time with them can be tremendously healing. They can help us
recover the playful parts of ourselves, enjoy the moment, and see the
world through fresh eyes. However, there are certain things that keep
us from fully enjoying our children.

Trying
to pack in too much

In
today’s super-stretched culture of achievement, we sometimes pack
in too much and end up getting annoyed when our children can’t keep
up the pace. Too many work hours, house projects, parties,
preschools, basketball classes, ballet recitals, hockey games, and
piano lessons can leave us wilted or high-strung. We might take
children to Target, the park, and their sister’s play at school in
a single morning, which invites power struggles and not-so-perfect
behaviors. The slower we go and the fewer transitions we have with
children, the more we tend to enjoy them.

Not
feeling happy ourselves

After
having a baby, lives of both mothers and fathers change completely.
Free time, work, and friendships look vastly different. There tends
to be a crisis period in which parents grieve the loss of their “old
life” and search for new ways to make themselves happy. Research
suggests that having a baby can also significantly stress a
partnership. As parents negotiate changes in chores, workloads,
childcare, and recreation, conflicts arise. If we take proactive
steps, such as journaling, going
to counseling,
talking to friends, engaging in self-care, and communicating, we can
move toward wellness. It’s hard to enjoy children when we’re in
a funk ourselves.

Lack
of awareness of developmental issues

Children’s
developmental phases might include: it’s all about me; I’m trying
to be my own person so don’t tell me what to do; I’m going to
test out my powerful self; mine!; I’m going to determine the
boundaries of this place; and I want to do things on my own terms.
Children have developmental difficulty sharing until at least age 2
or 2 ½ but really until 5, and true empathy does not mature in
children until age 6. It’s great to condition and encourage
children to share and be empathic before then, but we may not always
be completely successful. When we shift our expectations of how
children “should be” behaving, we can create room to be more
understanding, patient, and content with them.

Smart
distractions

The
invention of the smart phone and other intelligent devices has made
it easier to bring our work, email, social media, news, grocery
shopping, weather forecast, job search, sports videos, and exercise
software to the park, playroom, rocking chair, dinner table, and
bleachers on the sides of kids’ sports games. Distractions like a
smart phone can pull us away from our kids, and they can also cause
us to not enjoy our kids as much. With an itchy beeping, tinkling,
jiggling, tweeting, dinging, alarming device glued to our fingertips,
it can be hard to throw the football around at the park, build with
Legos, or cover our eyes for a game of peekaboo. With the world in
our pockets, it can be hard to focus on or appreciate the people in
front of us.

Not
honoring the first five years as a unique, temporary time in life

It’s
likely that never again will you be as needed and as in demand by
your family as you are when your kids are 0 to 5 years old. As you
give baths, change diapers, feed the baby, toilet train, wake up all
night, play, read books, and give children more attention than you’ve
ever given anyone, you may feel like your family life is pulling you
away from the rest of your life. Your house may be messy, your grass
long, and your emails unanswered. Remembering that this is a very
temporary, very unique time in life can alleviate some of the
unsettling feelings associated with changes regarding work, friends,
family, or leisure pursuits.

Erin
Leyba, LCSW, PhD, mom to three, is an individual and marriage
counselor for new parents in Chicago’s western suburbs. Follow her
blog at www.parenthappy.org
or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/www.parenthappy.org